{"id":7463,"date":"2017-10-11T09:47:48","date_gmt":"2017-10-11T09:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.saic.edu\/cate\/?p=7463"},"modified":"2025-01-09T11:15:31","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T17:15:31","slug":"on-jim-trainor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/2017\/10\/11\/on-jim-trainor\/","title":{"rendered":"On Jim Trainor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Jim Trainor, still from The Pink Egg (2017). Courtesy of the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our fall 2017 season kicks off this week with a screening of The Pink Egg<\/em>, the first live-action feature by Chicago filmmaker and animator Jim Trainor.<\/p>\n

Featuring his trademark dark comedy and fascination with the natural world,\u00a0Trainor’s\u00a0The Pink Egg<\/em> explores the complex and curious lives of insects by casting\u00a0humans in the starring roles.<\/p>\n

This week, we are excerpting Trainor’s conversation\u00a0with Irene Borger, writer and Director of the Herb Alpert Awards<\/a>, of which Trainor was a recipient in 2010. <\/span><\/p>\n

In this in-depth interview,<\/a> Trainor discusses his work through the topics of line, voice, sources, animals, and transgression.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Filmmaker Jim Trainor<\/span>\u00a0in conversation\u00a0with Irene Borger, September 2010<\/span>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Irene Borger:\u00a0A number of your key films have animals as the protagonists and tell the stories from their point of view.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jim Trainor:\u00a0<\/strong>Let me start by pointing out that in recent years my films have segued from animal themes to human themes. The Bats<\/em><\/a>\u00a0[1998] and The Moschops<\/em>\u00a0[2000] are anthropomorphic only to the extent that the animal narrators use language–rather fancy, poetic language–to describe their emotions and their life cycles. But their behavior is purely animal. I tell people over and over that my animals really are just animals, they are not stand-ins for humans, but nobody believes me.<\/p>\n

People get a little dewy-eyed and platitudinous about nature, so I enjoy troubling them about it. Right now I\u2019m working on a film on parasitic wasps – which Darwin himself said were incommensurate with a benevolent deity.<\/p>\n

Since the harmony of nature is actually based on an unhappy system of things destroying other things, I am continually struck and amused by nature documentaries’ almost compulsive tendency to try to comfort us instead of leaving us stranded in existential horror, where we belong.<\/p>\n

Still, I am not completely unsentimental, and even I root for the baby lost penguin, or the gazelle that escapes the lion’s claws!<\/p>\n

\n

IB:\u00a0How has your work changed over time? How will the new film differ from–and carry on threads of–what you’ve already created?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

JT:\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>Certain artists make the same work over and over, and I think I am one of those. It is as if I\u2019ve found all my themes and will keep working on them, and never be able to get them out of my system. I am very excited about the wasp movie, The Pink Egg.<\/em> For the first time I\u2019m making a live-action film (with a proper screenplay), with actors (actresses, mostly), enacting the life cycles of insects.In my quiet way I enjoy bossing people around and the idea of directing actors tickles me. Even though I\u2019m going out on a limb here, I\u2019m confidant that this wacky concept will work, and work as a funny, austere horror movie, as improbable as that sounds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Read the full interview here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tOur fall 2017 season kicks off this week with a screening of The Pink Egg, the first live-action feature by Chicago filmmaker and animator Jim Trainor.\t\t […]<\/p>\n

Read More… from On Jim Trainor<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":206,"featured_media":7434,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[115,287,314],"class_list":["post-7463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-22","tag-chicago","tag-interviews","tag-jim-trainor"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/206"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7463"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9807,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7463\/revisions\/9807"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}